It was unclear from this summary but there are a few parties here: the original farmer A, the neighbouring family B, the city C, and the datacenter builder D.

A sold to C with the deed restriction

C sold to D without the restriction

B tried to sue to stop D from building the datacenter, but B has no standing.

Okay, that makes sense. It seems to me that A or C has standing, but not B. And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing. But either way, B is just some random person in this relationship.

Why shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.

So there are two issues: (c) shouldn't be able to sell without the restriction, and (b) knowing of the restriction made decisions in good faith believing it would be followed and hence have been harmed by it not being followed, no? If (b) doesn't have standing, nobody does and deed restrictions are de facto useless.

Are B not part of the city?

Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?

(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).

B doesn't have standing because they are indirectly harmed? So if I sell a home in an HOA without the HOA covenant on the deed, can the HOA sue? It seems they are also only indirectly harmed.

"standing" is a made-up concept with a fairly short history. Remember how we look back at the early part of the 20th century as being filled with virtuous people at every level of industry and govt? me neither:

The modern U.S. doctrine of standing traces back to mid-20th-century Supreme Court cases that crystallized the “injury in fact,” causation, and redressability triad, but its roots lie in early 20th-century rulings such as Fairchild v. Hughes (1920) that first linked federal judicial power to a plaintiff’s concrete injury.

In which case C should be held culpable for the violation of the terms from A. As the condition of the sale. B should not sue D, but C. Try to get an A witness.

But that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc.

I wouldn't call a community member some random person.

It is exactly same like when OEM will make you sign agreement that you won't try to reverse engineer the car, but if you will flip it without the restriction, then all is clear.

Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.

Deed restrictions are the mechanism that basically all HOAs are built upon so if you can just skirt around them because $reasons there are millions of people who would like to know.

B should have standing from the park designation creating a public easement. I'm guessing the deed restrictions are pretty thin, and that pages++ of legalese would have done a better job. But this is the exact dynamic that everyone (rightly) hates attorneys for, both on the giving side ($$$ to hire an attorney to copypasta all that crap), as well as on the receiving side (pages of legalese are bound to create a bunch of extra facets to be dealt with by both the city and residents). Rather than the same rough type of structure needing to be reinvented over and over out of common law cloth, we really need reform aimed at defining commonly understood constructs that can simply be instantiated by reference.